1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, an information processing program and a program recording medium that can suitably be applied to a computer system including a media drive such as a disc drive for recording information in or reproducing information from a recording medium having a file system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Jpn. Pat. Appln. Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-243072 refers to a virtual file system that an optical disc drive generates by analyzing a real file system on an optical disc and combining the video data and the audio data recorded on the real file system in separate files to a single video/audio file.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/0232589 discloses a technique of providing an access to a host (e.g., a personal computer) on the basis of a unit of virtual file by means of a serial bus protocol (SBP-2) command. With this technique, the virtual file system that the optical disc drive provides by means of an SBP-2 command is provided as a file input/output service to an application that is a user by means of a file system driver operating as a redirector.
FIG. 10 illustrates the basic concept of this technique.
Referring to FIG. 10, the host is typically a personal computer (PC) 300 and the device is an optical disc drive 400. The optical disc drive 400 is a device for recording information on and reproducing information from an optical disc 7.
The optical disc drive 400 is equipped with a logical/physical address conversion feature 401 for performing logical/physical address conversion in order to access the physical block as recording/reproduction access to the optical disc 7.
The optical disc drive 400 is also equipped with a real file system providing feature 402 for providing a real file system and realizing a logical block access according to the real file system built on the optical disc 7 (in FIG. 10, “FS” represents a “file system”).
Still additionally, the optical disc drive 400 is equipped with a virtual file system providing feature 403 for converting the real file system into a virtual file system.
Furthermore, the optical disc drive 400 is equipped with a host input/output (I/O) providing feature 404 for providing a virtual file system by means of a SBP-2 command.
On the other hand, the personal computer 300 is equipped with a device I/O providing feature 301 for realizing an access based on a virtual file system by means of a SBP-2 command.
With the above-described feature arrangement, the application of the personal computer 300 can handle data on the optical disc 7 by means of the virtual file system.
In other words, the real file system on the disc 7 is converted into a virtual file system by the optical disc drive 400 and provided to the personal computer 300 and the application can access the optical disc 7 by means of the virtual file system as the virtual file system is provided to the application program interface (API) 302 at the personal computer 300.